SUMMARY:
- If you’re going to move in the prophetic and be the voice of the Lord to people, you need to understand that you are representing the very NATURE of God.
- You are communicating more than just words; you’re communicating a passion and a heartbeat.
- As a prophetic person, you are designed to have experiences that reveal who God is for you and the affection of God (His power, consistency and capacity) to enable you to stand and live in His presence.
- Agape love is the all embracing love that covers EVERYTHING.
- The Father put us into Christ – the ONE place you always get your needs met and would always be secure in His affection.
- The Holy Spirit is the manifestation of agape love in your life.
- It takes God to love God – when you experience the love of God fully yourself, you are totally released to love God.
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INSPIRATIONAL QUOTES:
FULL TRANSCRIPT:
So, I’m going to start by reading you something from the Bible. And if you have your Bible there, it’s in 1 Corinthians, chapter 13, a very famous passage. I think most passages in the Bible are pretty famous. This is one that’s wonderfully well known. Verse one,
“If I speak with the tongues of men, and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I’m nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor. And if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient. Love is kind. It’s not jealous. Love doesn’t brag. And it’s not arrogant. It doesn’t act unbecomingly. It doesn’t seek its own. It’s not provoked, and does not take into account a wrong suffered. It doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things. Love believes all things. Love hopes all things, and endures all things. Love never fails.”
The reason I’m reading that passage out is because you know, if we’re going to move in the prophetic, if we’re going to represent, be the voice of the Lord to people, then we need to understand that we are representing the essential nature of who God is. So what we’re doing in this session is, we are determining the nature of God. So that when we prophesy to people – when we edify, exhort, and encourage people – then we have this developed sense that we are doing it from the very heartbeat of God. So that what we are communicating is more than just a form of words.
It’s a passion, it’s a heartbeat.
And that heartbeat has to come out of our lifestyle, so that the way that we live, the way that we connect with people, in general, is also the same way that we connect with people prophetically. That when people receive a prophetic word, they should understand something of the passion, and the emotion and the affection that God has for them as an individual. So we are communicating a heart. We’re communicating a passion, we’re communicating God’s DNA in terms of how He loves us.
And so it’s important for us that we are allowing ourselves to have experiences of who God is for us, and that we ourselves really have our story straight, in terms of the love of God, and the affection of God, and its consistency, its power, and its capacity to enable us to stand and live in His presence. So another passage that’s equally as famous, is in Romans chapter 8:35. And that says,
“Who will separate us from the love of Christ? Will tribulation, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or sword?”
Here’s the important thing for us to understand. We are going to be talking to people prophetically who are in maybe several areas of stress and difficulty in their life. They may have just lost a loved one, they may have just suddenly find themselves unemployed, for the first time in 30 years. They may have had some family trauma going on. So when the Bible talks here about: nothing can separate us from the love of God, it may be they’ve made a huge mistake, they’ve done something phenomenally stupid. When we meet people in all areas of life, and so the one thing that we need to do is to be as consistent with that individual as God would be.
Remember that He does not change. He is the same yesterday, today and forever. He is the same towards you, on your worst day, as He is on your best.
And so prophecy reflects that. The heartbeat of a prophetic individual ministering to another human being reflects the unchanging nature of who God is. And so it’s important for us to be living in the unchangeableness of God, to know you know exactly where you are with God, every single day in every situation. Why? Because He never changes. He never changes. Just as it’s written.
“For your sake, we’re being put to death all day long. We were considered as a sheep to be slaughtered, but all these things we overwhelmingly conquer, through Him who loved us. For I am convinced that neither death nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor things present, nor things to come, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other created thing,”
Pretty exhaustive list, eh?
“will be able to separate us from the love of God, which is in Christ Jesus, our Lord.”
You know, it’s interesting that the early Greeks, when they were trying to come to grips with the unchangeable love of God, and the immensity of how God loved, they discovered that they didn’t have a word for that love in their language. They had no word, they had no concept that could cover the broadness, the immensity of how God loved people. And so they invented a word, they made up a word, purely so they could try and categorize what the immensity of God looked like. And the word that they chose was the word: “agape”.
Agape is the all embracing love that covers everything, a love that covers a multitude of sins.
So love that covers every single eventuality, no matter how outrageous, no matter how bad, no matter how awful, a love that could cover every kind of eventuality that could exist in the life of a human being. It’s the all embracing love that covers everything. The love of God, agape. Agape is all about the nature of God. It His nature to love. And it’s His character that is the bedrock of how that love is expressed.
So when we prophesy, we are prophesying in line with that character, with that nature, with the whole meaning and purpose of agape. That means you have to allow yourself to be touched by the love of God. One of the things that prophetic people need, is we need to know how to receive that love of God for ourselves. How to express it in normal, everyday conversation, so that when we come to prophesy everything in us is lined up with the very heartbeat of God.
God Himself is the origin of any command that He makes of us. He seeks to be our source for every experience of Him that He plans for us. So one of the things we need to understand today is that God has a plan for how He loves you. God is very intentional about how He loves you. He’s very purposeful in how He approaches you. And He’s very defined, and very definite about what He wants to be for you in any kind of situation. And so in that then, there is a confidence that rises up in us, that we are the Beloved of God.
So it’s important for you, not just as a prophetic individual, but it’s important for you, as a person, as a child of the Kingdom, to understand the You are the Beloved of God. There will never be a moment when He doesn’t love you. And if you’re messing up, His love will cover a multitude of situations going on in your life. So here’s the great thing about God, you always know where you are with Him because he never changes.
So it’s a key thing for the Lord that He is represented by people who really understand that dynamic. So that you’re not giving a mixed message, when you communicate the heart of God to people. Because His heart in you is fixed, and it is secure. And you love your life with God because you always know what He wants to be for you. And that’s really what we’re learning in our relationship with the Holy Spirit. You know, God doesn’t just give love as a gift. He doesn’t just say, “Well, here’s some love.”
When God loves, He gives Himself to you.
Because He is the source for agape. Jesus is agape incarnate. He is the begotten Son of God, of the Father, who lives in us, so that all that God has for us may come to us in the name and for the sake of Jesus. One of the acts of genius that the Father did was He put us into Christ.
He put you into the one place you’d always get your prayers answered. He put you into the one place, you’d always get your needs met. He put you into the one place where you would always be secure in His affection.
And then He gives you the Holy Spirit, to teach you how to stay there. How to stay, how to abide, how to dwell in the love of God, so that every day, your confidence in the affection of God for you actually dominates your life, and it dominates your thinking. It dominates your perception, and therefore it dominates your language. So that when you speak prophetically, people are moved by love.
I love the Holy Spirit, because He is the manifestation of agape love in our lives. He’s the one that takes everything that belongs to Jesus and shows it to us. He takes all the affection and unchanging love of God, and make sure that we are marinated in it day after day after day. So that, in essence, we have this threefold cord of agape from the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, literally at work in our own lives. And it makes this unbreakable bond between us and the Godhead.
Why am I laboring this point? It’s because when people come into connection with the prophetic, they come into connection with the community that we live with day after day of Father, Son, Holy Spirit, and you. That you are part of that community, and they touch base with that community when they connect with you. And because you’re living in the not community, you become as clear and as definite in your prophetic language to people as the Lord would be if He was speaking to you direct.
So that’s what we’re looking for is clear, precise, emotional connection with people that allows them to feel great about themselves. You ever had those moments, when you know that the Lord is rebuked you, but you didn’t actually understand that He rebuked you until like two days later? You ever had that experience? It’s like suddenly, it’s Thursday, and it’s like, “Hang on a minute? You told me off on Tuesday.” And the Lord says, “I know.” “But I’ve only just realized right now?” “I know.” “But You did it so wonderfully that I didn’t feel I was being rebuked.” “I know. It’s My specialty.”
And you realize just how full the Lord’s language is with His passion for us, His love for us, His affection for us. That He just wants us to be radically loved. He knows in the process of that, we will allow ourselves to become like Him. And in fact, if you can connect with the love of God, in a really deep way, becoming like Jesus, actually on days, is not that difficult. Because most of it is we are enjoying being loved.
We are enjoying being the Beloved.
And that’s really key for us, that we are full of delight about who God is for us. You know, love, in the biblical sense, is a longing and an intention towards another person. That what you feel about them is you want the best for them. You want them to grow, you want them to develop, you want them to be happy, you want them to be successful. You have a longing and an intention towards them for their good. God’s agape creates that longing and intention towards Himself. This is the truth about love is. It takes God to love God. What does that mean? It means that when you experience the love of God fully yourself, you are totally released to love God. God isn’t expecting you to love Him outside of His connection with you.
In other words, in order for you to love God properly, you have to be loved effectively by Him. So one of the biggest things we have to learn is how to receive love every single day. Because this is how it works. You know, the Bible says that everything comes down from the Father of lights. So everything we need everything that pertains to life and godliness, God will give it to you first.
So if God gives you a command to love somebody, then He is going to fulfill that command by loving you first.
So whatever God wants from you, He intends to give to you. So what we are learning in our relationship with the Holy Spirit, we’re learning how to receive. We’re learning how to be filled up with the love of God. We’re learning how to be the Beloved, because it’s not like the Lord is saying, if you’re going to be prophetic, you’ve got to love people so get on with it.
The Lord says, if you’re going to represent My heartbeat, you need to receive who I am for you. So let me be something to you that you can’t be by yourself. And when I bring you into contact with these people, I will be the love that drives your heart that makes you speak to those people.
And here’s the wonderful thing is, the Lord is going to make sure that He has some difficult people around your life. Why? Because He’s teaching you how to love effectively, difficult people are a shortcut into loving magnificently. They’re like a crash course. So if you’re living with one, you have a constant crash course in the love of God.
If you’re working with people, that it’s difficult to love. They’re very difficult. Maybe they’re antagonistic, maybe they’re oppositional? Well, God always make sure that you have a smattering of those people around your life. Because those are the people who will take you into the love of God faster. And deeper. Yeah? They’re a blessing. They don’t look like it. But they are a blessing. My wife is married to one.
These people teach you how to love deeply because you look at them, and nothing in you personally wants to be a friend of that person or even have a connection or a conversation. But the Lord has brought that person into your life so that you can practice love. And if you can get it right with difficult people, everybody else is a pushover. Yeah?
